What is Doxing? How hackers trace people with Doxing?
Let's start with the Use of Doxing:
Hackers can track Innocent peoples' data and hack their accounts.
Security Experts can trace the Hackers (can trace some innocent hackers only, Noobs).
This will be helpful for solving Cyber Crime cases.
Definition of Doxing:
Doxing is derived from Document Tracing.
Doxing is tracing the information from internet resources about particular person.
Usually internet users leave their information (like gender, name, city) in some websites (like social networks).
So using some searching techniques, we can gather complete data about a person.
This type of searching (tracing) is known as Doxing.
This data can be used to hack their account or trace them.
What you can find using Doxing?
- Real Name, Age, Gender
- Email Id, Registered websites
- Social Network Page (Facebook, Twitter links)
- Address, Phone Number
- Parent’s Names and their jobs
- Place of Education (School/University etc.)
- Relatives and more data.
From where are you going to start?
Yes, if you know the person's real name, then start from his name.
If you know the username then start from there or if you know any other data, start from there using name or username, search for other information in Google.
How to do Doxing?
Just assume you want to gather information about one of forum member.
Let us assume his username is John.
If you search in Google as “John”, you will get thousands results about John.
So what you are going to do?
You have some other information about John in that forum itself.
For example, You got his birthday.
Now you can continue your searching with “John xx/xx/xxx”.
This will reduce the results.
Not only birthday, you can use some other info like signature.
For example if he put signature in forum as “Red Devil”.
You can continue searching using “John Red Devil”.
This will reduce the Results.
Sometime your target person registered in multiple forums, websites, social networks.
So while searching, you will get result of registered website of him using that username or info.
Using Email Address for Tracing:
If you got the email address of target person, it is much easier to trace the person.
You can search using in the following sites you may get some data.
Websites that will be useful for Doxing:
www.myspace.com
www.bebo.com
www.facebook.com
www.google.com
www.pipl.com
www.wink.com
www.123people.com
www.zabasearch.com
...
You can find any other site related to target person and search for his data.
Doxing needs Intelligence:
Doxing needs Intelligence and searching ability.
You have to guess where to search and what to search about person.
Depending on searching ability, you will get what you required.
Security Question:
Hacker can get the victim’s security question answer using doxing.
For example, if your questions is “What is your pet name?”, he can find it.
He will search your name in Facebook or Google and may find a post or picture of you with your pet with the pets name captioned in the Photo.
Done! Your account is compromised.
Dictionary Attack:
Hackers can gather information about the victim and create a dictionary file (wordlist) for a target person alone.
Using that dictionary file, he can crack your passwords.
Conclusion:
Doxing is one of powerful hacking method.
Security Tips of Users:
- Don’t use Internet :p
This is best security tip because your data can be traced by anyone, sounds crazy?!
No one likes to leave the Internet.
So here are some other tips-
- Be careful when you give information in internet.
- Use very strong passwords which has alphanumeric characters and special characters.
- Don’t set Stupid security Question for account, set a custom security question.
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